Strategic concentrate feeding in spring block calving systems

Richard Tucker started the meeting with a farm update informing those attending that currently reseeding was a priority. Since the last meeting, they had been affected by the dry weather over the summer period, a once in thirty year happening, that had resulted in two months of zero grass growth. To mitigate this, they had been feeding 6KG of concentrate and the same amount of sileage and had also purchased 50 tonnes of hay. They established the cost of this concentrate and extra hay was 5p per litre. Despite additional costs production had been strong and they had reduced their overheads by 4%.

Andre looked at the feed options for grazing herds, explaining his ethos that for reasons of profit and animal happiness he always puts grass first.

Top grazing tips to reduce concentrate use

• Make the most use of grass in your herds diet to drive down feed costs
• Measure your success by recording your milk solids output per hectare
• Feeding concentrate during grazing uptake reduces grass utilisation
• Long grass has no place in your system and is often brown, dead and non-nutritious
• Turn out cows in the spring on to shorter grass and encourage them to graze it to low residuals, which stimulates growth and also teaches the cow to graze to a lower depth
• The first feed is for the grass and the second is for the cow
• People, often start with how much concentrate to feed – instead begin with how much utilisation you can get from your grass
• On a spring system once you get above 1kg ms per 1kg liveweight it may be worth considering buying more cows.